When to Think of Choosing a Mobile Website and Responsive Website

As technology grows at a galloping pace and the world goes mobile, it has overtaken fixed internet access in comparison that is used by desktop users. People love to search their product and services through mobile. They keep searching their requirements on smart phones and if your business website is not mobile friendly, then you would not show up in the search result. Hence to make your product and service available for every customer, you and everyone else has to accept this new phenomenon.

Now the next question that comes to your mind is whether you need a mobile website or a responsive website? It all depends upon your need: firstly, you will have to analyse what you are offering to your customers?

Mobile Websites: In a mobile website, you usually create a copy of the website domain: i.e. “m.example.com”. Mobi websites are specifically designed and optimized for mobile devices only, where server delivers the page that is smaller and easier to navigate.

Responsive Website: Responsive websites are designed in such a technical way that websites fit their size automatically on the device on which they are being viewed, whether it is a mobile, a tablet, or a laptop. It serves all the devices on the same set of URL. Google thinks this is a better solution.

According to Google, they recommend you to go with a mobile friendly website, i.e., a responsive website. Especially starting April 21st Google has recommended those websites for search engine ranking only which are friendly on all the devices, i.e., are responsive websites. Responsive website serve one set of URL with the same HTML, same content but CSS media queries depend upon the browser displaying page. Thinking responsive is not just to get ranking on Google, but responsive websites are also more affordable than .mobi domains.

Time is money: If you have two different websites for desktop users and for mobile users, then you need to design .mobi domain and the desktop domain separately with different content, different HTML and most importantly, you will have to optimize both the websites separately and you also need to spend on maintenance costs for both the websites which will be very high.A responsive website serves one URL only for all the devices, so you do not need to pay for separate content, separate coding, and the domain and maintenance costs.

Marketing: Different domains need equal effort for both the URL’s. You will to have to optimize both the URL’s separately, which may cost very high and it also kills your time.

Maintenance: Separate mobile and responsive websites need maintenance from time to time. Maintenance not only considers cost but you will also have to update your mobile website whenever you update your desktop version and most importantly, for a mobile site, you will have to update according to different mobile version, browser and size.

Conclusion: #RWD websites are easy to manage, involve a one-time cost and are also preferred by Google. They also deliver excellent result in terms of the future and provide great user experience. Additionally, here Google crawls only one URL and whatever content we added on the website, #ResponsiveWebsite, allows users to interact and share on the social media sites.